This blog reflects my views on learning and memory. Typically, I write summaries of research reports that have practical application for everyday memory.I will post only when I find a relevant research paper, so don't expect several posts a week. I recommend that you use RSS feed to be notified of each new post.
My Web site: http://thankyoubrain.com. Follow on Twitter @wrklemm
Copyright, W. R. Klemm, 2005. All rights reserved.

Thursday, March 21, 2013

When it comes to
improving learning and memory, motivation is way ahead of whatever is in second
place. From my own experience and from observing hundreds of students, it is
clear to me that people will learn when they WANT to learn. Even in the face of
bad textbooks, bad schools, bad teachers, … whatever, motivated students will
learn. If people with few learning resources, like Booker T. Washington or Abe
Lincoln could do it in their day, our kids can certainly do it with all the
information available in the millions of books in public libraries and web
sites on the Internet.

One of my blog readers
called my attention to a recent post on NannyPro.com web site, entitled “24 Blogs Filled with Ideas
on How to Motivate Your Kids to Finish the School Year Strong.” As author
Michelle points out, motivation of students in school commonly falls in the
Spring sinkhole of Spring break and end-of-year doldrums.

Advice to parents includes
specific ways to set goals, tips for getting kids to do homework, and ideas for
pumping up motivation. Michelle’s blog has links to other useful sites. Those I
checked that looked promising to me included one on “21 Simple Ideas to Improve
Student Motivation.” Another helpful site is titled “Reward Effort Before Test
Day.” Other site topics you might want to check out include:

“Homework That Motivates”

“Lighting A Fire: Motivating Boys To Succeed”

"The Secret of Setting Successful Goals”

“Top Tips: Getting kids to do their homework”

Michelle also lists some
ideas for schools to do. Parents ought to take a look at these and make
suggestions that could be appropriate for their local school.

If
you haven’t gotten your child a copy of my “Better Grades, Less Effort”
you have denied them of a possible school-life-changing opportunity. It may be
the best $2.99 you ever spent.

Wednesday, March 13, 2013

Ever try to read your physician’s
prescriptions? Children increasingly print their writing because they don’t
know cursive or theirs is unreadable. I have a middle-school grandson who has
trouble reading his own cursive. Grandparents may find that their grandchildren
can’t read the notes they send. Our new U.S. Secretary of the Treasury can’t
(or won’t) write his own name on the new money being printed.

When we adults went to school, one
of the first things we learned was how to write the alphabet, in caps and lower
case, and then to hand-write words, sentences, paragraphs, and essays. Some of
us were lucky enough to have penmanship class where we learned how to make our
writing pretty and readable. Today, keyboarding is in, the Common Core
Standards no longer require elementary students to learn cursive, and some
schools are dropping the teaching of cursive, dismissing it as an “ancient
skill.”[1]

The primary schools that teach
handwriting spend only just over an hour a week, according to Zaner-Bloser
Inc., one of the nation's largest handwriting-curriculum publishers. Cursive is
not generally taught after the third grade (my penmanship class was in the 7th
grade; maybe its just coincidence, but the 7th grade was when I was
magically transformed from a poor student into an exceptional student).

Yet scientists are discovering that
learning cursive is an important tool for cognitive development, particularly
in training the brain to learn “functional specialization,”[2]
that is capacity for optimal efficiency. In the case of learning cursive
writing, the brain develops functional specialization that integrates both sensation,
movement control, and thinking. Brain imaging studies reveal that multiple
areas of brain become co-activated during learning of cursive writing of pseudo-letters,
as opposed to typing or just visual practice.

There is spill-over benefit for thinking
skills used in reading and writing. To write legible cursive, fine motor
control is needed over the fingers. Students have to pay attention and think
about what and how they are doing. They have to practice. Brain imaging studies
show that cursive activates areas of the brain that are not affected by
keyboarding.

Much of the benefit of cursive
writing comes simply from the self-generated mechanics of hand- printing
letters. During one study at Indiana University to be published this year,[3]
researchers conducted brain scans on pre-literate 5-year olds before and after receiving
different letter-learning instruction. In children who had practiced
self-generated printing by hand, the neural activity was far more enhanced and
"adult-like" than in those who had simply looked at letters. The
brain’s “reading circuit” of linked regions that are activated during reading
was activated during cursive writing, but not during typing. This lab has also
demonstrated that writing letters in meaningful context, as opposed to just
writing them as drawing objects, produced much more robust activation of many
areas in both hemispheres.

In learning to write by hand, even
if it is just printing, a child’s brain must:

Locate each stroke relative to other strokes.

Learn and remember appropriate size, slant of
global form, and feature detail characteristic of each letter.

Develop categorization skills.

Cursive writing, compared to
printing, is even more beneficial because the movement tasks are more
demanding, the letters are less stereotypical, and the visual recognition
requirements create a broader repertoire of letter representation. Cursive is
also faster and more likely to engage students by providing a better sense of
personal style and ownership.

Other research highlights the hand's
unique relationship with the brain when it comes to composing thoughts and ideas.
Virginia Berninger, a professor at the University of Washington, reported her
study of children in grades two, four and six that revealed they wrote more
words, faster, and expressed more ideas when writing essays by hand versus with
a keyboard.[4]

There is a whole field of research
known as “haptics,” which includes the interactions of touch, hand movements,
and brain function.[5]
Cursive writing helps train the brain to integrate visual, and tactile information, and fine motor dexterity. School
systems, driven by ill-informed ideologues and federal mandate, are becoming
obsessed with testing knowledge at the expense of training kids to develop better
capacity for acquiring knowledge.

The benefits to brain development
are similar to what you get with learning to play a musical instrument. Not everybody
can afford music lessons, but everybody has access to pencil and paper. Not
everybody can afford a computer for their kids−maybe such kids are not as
deprived as we would think.

Take heart. Some schools just
celebrated National Handwriting Day on Jan. 23. Cursive is not dead yet. Parents
need to insist that cursive be maintained in their local school.

Readers who want an
easy way to acquire a neuroscience background will want to know about the 2nd
Edition of my e-book, “Core Ideas in Neuroscience.” Check my web site for
available formats and sources (thankyoubrain.com/neurobook). Also check out the
Neuro-education discussion group I just created on Linkedin (type “Neuro-education" in Linkedin’s search field).

[1] Slape,
L. “Cursive Giving Way to Other Pursuits as Educators Debate Its Value.” The
Daily News, Feb. 4,

Friday, March 01, 2013

You have heard the
saying, “Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach him how to fish and
he will eat for a lifetime.” Well, when it comes to education, we commonly feed
our children cold dead-fish curricula, which they mostly soon forget. The
problem is not so much the curriculum as that it is too often delivered at the
expense of teaching students how to learn on their own and become lifetime
learners. What a lot of them do learn is to shun learning and even hate school
enough to drop out.

Fads come and go in
education. There was “new math.” Then it was the self-esteem movement. There is
the recent heavy emphasis on “hands-on” learning. Now the whole educational enterprise
is obsessed with high-stakes testing.

None of these things are
bad in themselves. It is just that they disturb educational balance and
emphasize teaching students WHAT to learn as opposed to WANT to learn and HOW to
learn.

The body politic stills
insists we need to throw more money at education and that will fix things. Numerous
studies show a lack of correlation between per pupil funding and educational
achievement. The school district that spends the most, Washington, D.C., has
the poorest educational achievement. Politicians and educators want more money.
These are the same folks who think the cure for the federal deficit is to
incur more debt so we can “stimulate” the economy. They don’t see the
structural problems that are the real causes of economic stagnation. Likewise,
they don’t see the real causes of educational stagnation.

Consider this: in terms
of inflation adjusted dollars for education, there has been a drastic increase
in spending on education in recent years, with very little evident benefit. As for spending on education, see chart below.

But I recently had an
experience suggesting that teachers in the trenches do “get it.” I gave a presentation
on Feb. 28 at the Texas Middle School Teachers Association meeting. My session
was in a time slot that competed with eight other presentations, yet every
chair in my room was taken, while the other sessions had relatively few
attendees. It’s not that I am a celebrity. These teachers didn’t know who I am.
But they did relate to my topic, “Teach Students How to Remember What You
Teach.”[1]
I gave the same talk again an hour later and expected few to attend because I
assumed that most teachers who were interested in this topic attended the first
session. But in the second session, also competing against eight others, the
room was again filled and teachers were bringing in chairs from other rooms.

Experienced teachers know
that our schools neglect cognitive development. That’s psychology talk for
teaching kids how to learn, remember, and think. I have been teaching
first-semester college freshmen the last couple of years, and it is apparent
that these students have a conspicuous lack of cognitive development, even
though my university is highly selective in its admissions. Most of the
freshmen lack strategy and tactics for learning and memory. Analytical and
creative thinking are typically superficial.

I am doing what I can to
help students learn how to learn and remember. Until my recent experience, I
doubted that educational policy makers were interested. Maybe now there’s hope.

[1]
I am available for speaking engagements or consultation on this topic. You can
email me at billATSIGNthankyoubrainDOTcom.